


yes, and?

by listlessness



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Toxic Relationships, heavily stylised writing, let's not pretend it's healthy, mix of past and present tense, mixing timelines, roundabout descriptions of rough sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:34:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23277913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/listlessness/pseuds/listlessness
Summary: There's a rhythm in the universe that the Doctor can sense. One of those things, for better or worse, is the Master.Sometimes it comes in the pattern of four drums.Sometimes it comes in just two words.
Relationships: Eleventh Doctor/O, Eleventh Doctor/The Master (Dhawan), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 80





	yes, and?

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes I get a few lines in my head and I'm compelled to write something even though it's not really going to go anywhere.
> 
> Welcome to that town.

_You're beautiful,_ he had said. _You're beautiful, and I'd like to take you to dinner._

She could still hear the words in her mind, over and over. She should have seen it for what it was. The Doctor hated herself for it now. She'd mistaken his giddiness for shyness, his fidgeting hands for that of a nervous, perhaps a little bit inexperienced, young man. The kind of man who had only ever been with women his whole life and had finally come into his own. 

She had accepted. Well, _he_ had accepted, because she'd been a man then. A tall man, not ginger, sadly. Tall and wiry, with a sharp nose and a propensity for tweed. And he-not-she had let O take him out at a restaurant of his own choosing. He'd let O think it wasn't entirely his own choice, though, looking back, the Doctor knew that was all entirely wrong. 

The Doctor had let O kiss him. Or, maybe, O had let him think that. Or, maybe, this was still part of the master (Master?) plan, to get inside her head a little more. 

Or, maybe, O had wanted to kiss the Doctor. 

_You're beautiful,_ he had said. _I'd like to take you home._

And the Doctor had let him. Because Earth was big and Earth was lonely and the Doctor never did well with big and lonely, and she had been so incredibly lonely at that point in time. No Rose, no Martha, and Donna had only just gone. Before Amy and Rory, and before River, and _oh_ , she missed River. 

And so he-not-she had gone home with O, and for a brief moment he hadn't been oh-so-lonely. 

She wonders now if he remembered that. If he thinks about it. If he was ever, _is_ ever, curious as to whether the Doctor did that often, if it had been limited to that body or if it was an innate trait, like the Doctor's constant need to be liked and loved and celebrated and pandered to, just a tiny bit. 

And, in turn, the Doctor wonders the same about him. If he did or does that with anyone else, or if he had hunted the Doctor out specifically that night. 

Or, if maybe, it was just a case of two lonely Time Lords reaching out for one another on a drizzly night, seeking out the most base form of comfort two people could find. 

_You're beautiful_ , he says now, and the Doctor wants to rip the very tongue from his mouth. _I'd like to hurt you._

* 

He's so much like his old self, his first self, this new version of him. He pulls the Doctor in, with that devilish smile and his eyes burning with intelligence and cunning. The Doctor only has to look at him and find herself back on Gallifrey, a summer sun above them and the whole universe in front of them. 

He's a lure on the end of a very sharp hook and she's a mindless creature, unable to resist. 

Around and around she goes, following him wherever she leads. She welcomes his traps with open arms, and despite how much she curses and fights, she knows she'll fall head-first right into the next one. 

* 

This is the dance they always do, they've always done, as old as time itself. They tease at one another, pulling at old threads and opening up old wounds. Neither of them can ever stay hidden for long, not when the other is there and enticing them to come out. 

She spits at him, baring her teeth and pulling at the metaphorical restraints that hold her back. Decency, humanity, the last desperate attempt of one lonely being seeking out the only other person who might possibly know what it's like to be her. 

'I hate you,' she says, trying not to bite her tongue at the lie. 

He laughs. She hates his laugh. She hates how it reminds her of lazy days and endless summers, when textbooks and lectures were a distant memory and a kiss on the horizon. 

_You're beautiful,_ he says later, when she hasn't quite calmed down but her anger isn't so white hot. She hasn't been calm in a long time. _Especially when you're angry._

Somehow he makes it sound like a promise. 

Their arguments always devolve into the same tired topics. She knows the beats by now, the subjects that will raise their ugly heads and the arguments that they'll thrust at one another. Each barb and taunt is like a noose that they wrap around each others throat, tightening the knot as they drag each other closer, refusing to let go before they have the last say. 

The Doctor hates how much she likes how it chokes her. Passion can be hard to come by. 

It's the same insufferable tug and pull that had lured her to him before. The magnetic tug, the call of twin heartbeats that seek each other out through time and space. It's a rhythm that lived in the Time Vortex, a noise that linked all Time Lords, wherever they still existed. It lives in the Master's veins now. 

_You're beautiful_ , he says, hissing out each syllable. _I'm going to make you watch the world burn._

And wasn't that a promise they'd made to each other time and time again? The sort of thing they said with a wild and fanatic glee, between threats of besting one another in a quiz, a vow made over breakfast before heading into an exam. It had been shouted from balconies and across footpaths, laughter on their shared voices. 

O had promised to set his world aflame. He-not-she in the time before hadn't read too far into it. And she tries now, she _tries_ to justify it, to quantify it, her world confusing and lost and miserable at the time, too entranced by a kiss and a what if. 

But that's always been her and him, him and her, constantly swapping and changing their roles as they chase each other throughout space and time. It's inevitable, the two of them, coming clashing back into each other's orbits. 

_You're beautiful_ , he says. _You're beautiful and I'm going to tear you apart._

The words don't even hit her, because he's already done it and she him. They've torn each other asunder, time and time again. Another time won't hurt. 

* 

The TARDIS needed time to rebuild, recharge, that's what he'd told Amy way back when. Two hours. Time always got away from him then. It slipped through his fingers, like oil and water. He'd only been walking around London, trying to kill time with his favourite hobby of people watching. 

And there had been O. Soft and nervous and stumbling over himself as he scurried to his job. He was still new, still fresh, only just having been given the nickname-cum-title of _O_. There was a boyish delight in his youthful face and a grin so wide that the Doctor's cheeks had hurt just looking at it. 

Dinner had been an accident. He hadn't even eaten and had just picked at the plate while O had smiled and babbled and scratched the cutlery over the crockery. Looking back, he-with-an-s-now realises that he hadn't eaten all that much, either. 

It's the little things that she misses, over and over and over. 

O kissed him, back when she was a him and she didn't get so confused about how to refer to herself, with a nervousness and a sweetness that felt so intensely human. Humans always had that slight undercurrent of anxiety, with a desperate need to be liked and accepted. Now, years later and so much older, the Doctor wonders if that had been part of the facade or if the Master, too, held that same fear. 

_You're beautiful_ , he had said, with his fingers against his lip and candlelight on his face. _Have you ever been told that?_

And maybe he had. The Doctor was sure he had been. The words weren't new and they lit up some old memory in the back of his mind. But this body was new, this face was new, and his brain hadn't yet made all the connections that linked one self to the next. He still had apple in the back of his teeth and smoke under his nails. 

Yes. Yes, he was sure he'd been called beautiful before. 

Would the Master do this again, call him that again with such compelling sweetness, if they weren't continuously compelled to tear one another apart? He'd always enjoyed a long game. Maybe he would. 

_You're beautiful_ , he had said, while pressing the Doctor against a hastily locked door. _You're beautiful and I'd like to keep you_. 

She wonders now if he'd meant that literally. Surely he would have had the Tissue Compression Eliminator on his person at that point. But it's difficult to focus on that, to fill that moment with dread or worry when she remembers how it had felt to kiss him, to touch him, to fill that lonely void deep inside of her for just a moment with someone else. 

She's always touch starved after a regeneration. Skin so new, nerves so raw, desperate for some kind of sensory input, and what better input than another person? If the Master was still new in this body, then perhaps he'd been seeking out that same kind of hunger. 

The burn of stubble and the softness of fingers against his face. The heat of another person's body against her own (and the Master had always run hotter than her, even then, even now, even in the earliest of days when they'd run through the Academy with the sun beating at their backs). The bed had creaked and O had tasted of salt and nerves and a memory of a time when the Doctor hadn't felt so lonely. 

_You're beautiful,_ he had said, the words seared in her memory. _Can you stay?_

And she had said no. 

And she had left. 

Because she always says no and she always leaves when asked to stay. 

And, in her own way, she had said 'I hate you,' and the Master knew that, _knows_ that, and maybe that's why he chases her. 

* 

He pushes her now against the wall of her TARDIS. Her, because she's a her now, and it doesn't feel so foreign on her tongue all the time. His fingers jams against her chest, once, twice, three times, hard enough to leave a bruise. She won't give him the pleasure of seeing her flinch, though she also doubts he'd get any enjoyment out of it. 

His anger simmers below the surface, bubbling up and up. It's directed at her, but she suspects, she _believes_ , it's only because she's a convenient target. She's always been a source of anger for him; a match of minds and skills, a confidante and companion when there's been no one else. 

She can take his anger and he can take hers. They've seen the cold and dark and ugly parts of one another, the parts that are shameful and wake them up at the most frightening hours of the night. 

They're too alike in that way. A pair of matching halves that almost fit together seamlessly, except for one bubble and a single crack that causes the two of them eternal friction. 

The Master's anger is directed externally, at everything and everyone else. The Doctor wonders if he's afraid to look inwards. If, perhaps, he took a breath and closed his eyes and asked himself where his anger lay, if it would be held deep inside his own chest. His own mind is a vortex of chaos, of pain and agony. It wouldn't surprise her to find out if that were case. 

Her own anger is pointed at herself. She believes (and the Doctor knows this about herself, a secret as remorseful as any other) that she needs to hold it in. She can't let anyone else see it, to know of the war she wages against herself. She keeps everyone at arms length for fear of anyone peeling back just one layer and finding the depth of her hurt. 

Their shared pain clashes together. Each stab of the Master's finger in her chest brings them closer, until she shoves him hard. He doesn't topple over, but he does laugh, and it's just enough to have her grabbing at the lapels of his jacket and thrusting him back towards the console. He trips over his feet, smacking against a pillar and falling to the ground. 

He keeps grinning. It's not the shy and nervous O looking up at her, but the vengeful and shivering boyhood friend of hers of so many years. 

She pins him, knees to his shoulders, her boots digging into his ribs and her hands hauling up fistfuls of her jacket so she can heave his head off the ground. 

He's enjoying this. Of course he's enjoying this. 

'You're beautiful,' she says. Her voice is steadier than she expects. 'I'm going to remember this.' 

The Master's smile widens and the last trace of O disappears with it. 

* 

She'll regret it later. She always does, with him. Now and before, when her concept of herself was still as muddled as it is now, but also strangely simpler. 

Fingerprints litter her chest and collar bones and shoulders by the time she's done with him. Likewise, her lips are bruised and bitten. There's a hole in the sleeve of her coat she'll need to mend, large enough for her to fit her thumb through. 

He's looking a little worse for wear himself. Clothing dishevelled, hair a knotted mess. He doesn't make eye contact as he adjusts his trousers, but she can feel his gaze staring daggers at the back of her head. 

She can fix it. 

Maybe she can fix _them_. 

She always has that thought. 

_You're beautiful_ , he says as he leaves. _You're beautiful when you're mad. When you can't stand me. You're beautiful when you say you hate me._

The Doctor doesn't want to agree, but she can't argue with it. And she nods and says 'yes, and?', and the Master finds himself similarly at a loss of words. 

* 

It was years ago, when they were both at the Academy. The summer sun on their back and a lifetime ahead of them. A laugh, a tumble. The Doctor had his head, because she had been a he for so long before the present, on the Master's lap. 

Promises were made. So many. Each sealed with a kiss and a laugh. 

They had all of eternity stretched out in front of them. Each star was counted and named. Brand new constellations were made from the comfort of their own room. Their fingers had been threaded together, the Master's other hand in the Doctor's hair, and if the rest of his life, her life, _their_ life had been spent like this, she would have been satisfied. 

_You're beautiful_ , one of them had said. _I want to remember you like this forever._

Now the Doctor can't remember who said it first. 


End file.
